The UPF Studies Centre on Science, Communication and Society (CCS-UPF) forms part of the European project Inclusive Science and European Democracies (ISEED), aimed at learning from citizen science projects to identify ways of engaging citizens in deliberative democracy.

Social challenges, such as national and international economic crises and the COVID-19 health crisis, fuel public skepticism and, in the worst-case scenario, can lead to a sense of political impotence and disconnect in European democracy. These crises threaten democratic values like inclusion, participation and diversity in public deliberation and political action. With this in mind, the question ISEED intends to explore is: what means are at our disposal, beyond political representation, to inspire and invite European citizens to actively participate and contribute to knowledge-based democratic governance?

The ISEED project, coordinated by the Ca ’Foscari University of Venice, brings together researchers from Italy, France, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Bulgaria, Uruguay and the United Kingdom.

The role of the CCS-UPF in the project is to analyse different ways of implementing a participative model in the public realm, as well as identify the most appropriate methods and scenarios for enabling citizens to rethink their participation in public debate. Currently, this participation is obstructed by a considerable lack of trust in our forms of political representation. This project, therefore, will be key to identifying public discussion spaces where citizens can actively participate in deliberative and inclusive debate. The CCS-UPF will also work towards identifying the different communicative processes that arise in participative processes involving citizens and scientists, and evaluating whether these approaches can also be used in democratic deliberation and decision-making.

Citizen science includes people without scientific training in the production of scientific knowledge. The ISEED project will analyse successful cases of citizen science in order to better understand the conditions most likely to ensure people’s informed inclusion and participation in knowledge-based democratic deliberation. It will be centred on science-related cases such as, for example, climate change or vaccination programmes, with a focus on audiences one might expect in such a debate, as well as groups that would not normally be likely participants.

The question ISEED intends to explore is: what means are at our disposal, beyond political representation, to inspire and invite European citizens to actively participate and contribute to knowledge-based democratic governance?

As an interdisciplinary project, ISEED combines theoretical analysis, in philosophy and social sciences, with empirical research, using qualitative approaches like discourse analysis, interviews and focus groups, as well as the analysis of digital text and digital tool development. One of the key results will be a computational tool that can describe argumentation styles in traditional and digital media, including the role of emotion and reason in polarised debates.

The ISEED project, coordinated by the Ca ’Foscari University of Venice, brings together researchers from Italy, France, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Bulgaria, Uruguay and the United Kingdom. It is a three-year project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.